Notes for a history of the IMG 1: Pat Jordan and the Nottingham bookshop

Pat Jordan (pictured front, with Bob Purdie behind) was a key figure in the development of International Marxist Group. We will cover his role in future posts and publish material about the importance of Nottingham in the development of the IMG including Jordan’s bookshop in Dane Street.

The Ozleft website has reproduced this short story which is a semi-fictional account of the Nottingham bookshop

As the introduction explains:

“Bob Gould found the following in a collection of English short stories in box of secondhand books he bought. The title, Trotsky’s Other Son, interested him, and on reading it he found it was a humorous, semi-fictional tribute to Pat Jordan, a longtime British Trotskyist, and to the pioneering period leading up to the left revival in the later 1960s.
The story had an introduction indicating that Carol Singh lived in Derby and was unemployed at the time the story was written. The story is set in the St Ann’s district of Nottingham. This area has been completely rebuilt, but was the city’s worst slum. It was a maze of small, bustling streets.”

Funnily enough, I recently came across a batch of a dozen or so Socialist Action pages on the Cowley witch hunt. As they are already photocopied I could quickly run them through a scanner tomorrow. I might well do some Miners Strike stuff at some point too but I am concentrating mainly on doing runs of full scans of papers. That doesn’t mean I won’t get round to scanning the Socialist Actions for 1984-5 though.

In the signs that bewilder the middle class, the aristocracy and the poor prophets of regression, we do recognise our brave friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer — the Revolution.
Karl Marx